Yesterday, we attended the wedding of my husband’s niece. For some reason the topic of how old we’ve all gotten kept coming up. We hugged uncles who are now great-great uncles, moms who are now grandmas; even my own children who used to be the babies aren’t even the little kids anymore — they have turned into the big kids. “I remember when she used to be smaller than your daughter,” people said again and again, turning to the bride and shaking their heads in disbelief, the passage of time an unfolding mystery.
My husband and I were considerably older than the bride and groom when we got married, but the pastor’s words during the service still resonated.
“You have no idea what you are getting yourself into,” he said, smiling. “And that’s OK, I didn’t either when I got married 37 years ago.”
Most of the older generation chuckled and nodded. There’s so much we don’t know, even when we are old, but it takes a long time to find out how much you don’t know, which is perhaps the greatest wisdom age grants us.
We left the wedding to make the two-and-a-half-hour drive home under a banner of dark clouds and distant lightning. I’d told the kids to bring blankets and pillows, so they snuggled up in the backseat while the man of the ranch checked the radar to see if we could take a different route to avoid the storm. The answer was probably not.
We were only 45 miles from the ranch when the worst of the weather caught us. My daughter was sound asleep, but my son was wide awake, staring out the windows with us as the rain fell so hard and so fast that it sounded like the car was being pelted with hailstones instead of water. We drove slowly, pulling over twice during the worst of the storm.
And then, quite suddenly, the rain turned to a gentle pitter-patter, and then, just as suddenly, a swirling mist. My son was concerned at first. The crashing of the rain on the windshield had indeed been intensely loud and threatening, but the soft glow of fog didn’t seem as scary. As the car slowly glided through the night, he finally lay back and closed his eyes.
Meanwhile, I kept thinking of the pastor’s words. None of us ever really knows what we are getting ourselves into, do we? We can make a guess, but most of life is like driving on unfamiliar roads. When we reach a fork, we can stop, ask for advice or pull out a map, but the truth is our lives are unique and so are the consequences of the choices we make. Even the best navigation tools only get us so far when we are traversing uncharted territory.
My kids get to hang out in the metaphorical backseat for a while yet. They depend on us to drive them around and to make the big decisions about which direction to turn or when to stop because it is raining too hard to continue. Parenting can be pretty stressful, but I love being able to do this for them, and it will be very, very hard to let them do it for themselves when that time comes. Or maybe it won’t be hard, who knows? Maybe it will be easier than I think because just like everything else, I won’t know till I get there.
Here’s one thing I do know: Driving through the fog, long after dark, both my husband and I leaned forward, our eyes straining against the swirling whiteness, trying to make out the sign for our own ranch so we’d know where to turn. I couldn’t help but glance over at him and smile. Eleven years ago, we took vows to stay together ‘till death parts us. I may not have known what I was getting myself into then, but I’m still unbelievably thankful to have him be the one next to me now.
